Friday, October 12, 2007

No. 1: The Bracket - Preseason EditionOver the years, we have shied away from putting together a preseason bracket, only because preseason brackets - like preseason polls when they eventually come out - won't end up meaning jack in a few weeks. Our first bracket of the year has traditionally come out after a couple of weeks of games - usually in mid-to-late November...well, until now. After years of holding out, we decided to give the readers what they have e-mailed us about and wanted for three years now - a preseason bracket. We made it our Bold Prediction No.1 for the 2007-2008 college basketball season.

Rivera's first semester academic ineligibility certainly isn't good news for St. Joseph's, but it's far from disastrous. He played well off the bench at times last year, but he also went scoreless (or almost scoreless) in nights when he played 15-20 minutes way too often.

As far as the A-10 goes, you're right - any number of teams could finish second. We still give the Hawks a slight edge over UMass, Rhode Island, GW, and our sleeper, Duquesne, based on the talent they return, but their hold on that second spot is by no means safe. What does look safe is that the A-10 is shaping up to be a multiple bid league, and because of that, we'll continue to hold two spots for them in our bracket.

The loss of Dollard for the year(and to a much lesser extent the loss of Quan Powell for the first five games of the season) are crushing blows to the Tigers' NCAA hopes. Jeff Lebo has already said publicly that he has no idea how Auburn will replace Dollard's team-leading 12.5 points and seven rebounds per game. The Tigers were thin inside as it is, and without Dollard they have almost zero experience left on the interior.

It's too late to remove Auburn from our preseason bracket, but don't expect the Tigers to be in our first regular season bracket when it comes out in late November.

We considered both Houston and UAB as at-large bids out of C-USA, but in the end both had too many question marks to be included in our preseason field. UAB certainly has NCAA tourney talent, but most of that talent is transfer talent. It may take a while for all of the team's new pieces to blend, and unfortunately the Blazers won't have a lot of time to gel with the slate of tough OOC tests they have to start the year (at Florida State, at Rhode Island, at Kentucky, at Wichita State). If they could ever win some or most of those games, than many people, including us, may start to reconsider C-USA's one-bid status. Right now, though, we'll stick with Memphis and Memphis only.

In most preseason brackets I see Stanford listed anywhere from 5 to 9. You have them right in the middle at 7. I just want to know where you think this team is going to lose a lot of games? They nonconference schedule is fairly easy and I wouldnt be surprised if they went 12-0. Then you would have to believe a Pac-10 at-large team will be 11-7 or better in conference giving the Cardinal around 23 wins. Will their nonconference SOS hurt their seed that bad?...Or will they lose more games I do not see? Thanks and good job on the preseason bracket!

Stanford's seed is really based on two factors - the strength of the Pac-10 and the weakness of the Cardinal's OOC schedule. There are four teams (UCLA, Washington State, Oregon, and USC) that we think are clearly better than Stanford as the season opens. At best, Stanford is the fifth best team in the conference, and we think they're the sixth best squad behind the Big Four and Arizona. A sixth place team in any league is not going to be a top-5 seed and in Stanford's case, they certainly won't, since at the end of the year, they almost certainly won't have a non-conference win against an NCAA tournament team. Don't worry: Stanford will ultimately make the dance, but it probably won't be at a seed line very much higher than what we have them at right now.

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